The protein transient receptor potential melastatin-like 7 (TRPM7) is a critical determinant of breast cancer cell metastasis, according to study results published in Cancer Research, a journal of the American Association for Cancer Research. The most important discovery that we report in this paper is that TRPM7 is required for metastasis, at least in a xenograft model of breast cancer metastasis," said Frank van Leeuwen, Ph.D., assistant professor at the Radbound University Medical Center in Nijmegen, the Netherlands. "While this fundamental biological finding will not have an immediate impact on patient care, we believe that it opens the door to a previously under-explored area of cancer therapeutics.